Democratic SEO for spam free website publication
Many people now have, or want to have, their published thoughts upon the democracy of the world wide web(www). New publishers face problems because their contributions are drowned out by others within the search engine results. This is mainly due to a lack of knowledge concerning the proper structure and delivery of content on the www. Search engines dominate access to publications and internet content found on the www so you must understand how to deliver content value to these search engines as well as to your web visitors.
The aims of this group are to share the basic principles of SEO so that your website publication and knowledge can stand a chance of being found while on-line marketeers are operating within a competitive field.
The 'free' Open Source movement has some very good and stable offerings such as WordPress and Joomla or Drupal. It has never been easier to have your domain and website hosted. You may deliver on-page content value upon your website but this does not matter if you do not take the time to understand the basic principles of site structure for SEO and some modest promotion. This group aims to deliver and exchange this SEO knowledge.
Founding member:
A Hinxman, Cert Web Apps (Open)
Web Design Milton Keynes
School maths teaching amounts to 'cognitive abuse', say researchers
The way maths is taught in many secondary schools often amounts to 'cognitive abuse', according to two educationalists who are suggesting a new approach.
They say maths pupils are often set tasks, such as memorising formulae they don't understand, that induce feelings of anxiety or fear. The result is a large number of people who find maths difficult, or even develop 'maths phobia'.
Fortunately researchers Sue Johnston-Wilder, Professor of Mathematics Education at Warwick University, and Dr Clare Lee, Education Lecturer at The Open University, have a solution which they call "mathematical resilience". This is a positive approach to learning maths which can be developed by using the right teaching strategies.
They put their ideas into practice in a secondary school, where they got pupils to work collaboratively on making short videos to explain mathematical ideas, and recruited non-maths staff to support maths learners.
The strategies encourage pupils to talk about learning maths and to take control of their own learning. Maths GCSE results at the school subsequently improved.
"The evidence shows mathematical resilience can be developed in learners when the ethos of the school encourages people to see that learning takes effort, but that that effort will result in improvement," say the researchers.
They say their results are encouraging so far but there is still further research to be done. The full research paper, Developing Mathematical Resilience, is available at Open Research Online.
The research also featured in the Times Educational Supplement on 24 February 2012, page 14.
Further information
The way maths is taught in many secondary schools often amounts to 'cognitive abuse', according to two educationalists who are suggesting a new approach. They say maths pupils are often set tasks, such as memorising formulae they don't understand, that induce feelings of anxiety or fear. The result is a large number of people who find maths difficult, or even develop 'maths ...
